Baldur's Gate 3's seventh and final major patch (though "crossplay and photo mode, alongside other fixes and updates" are planned for the future) is finally here—and like most of these major updates, it's one heck of a doozy. Luckily for me and my poor, sore hands, there's not a ton of major new features to go over (though new modding tools should certainly open some floodgates in the future).
As the notes read: "all stories must come to an end. As Swen said during last week’s PAX West panel in Seattle—our final live panel for Baldur’s Gate 3—it’s time for the team to go back to our cave and hang the armour on the wall while we focus on bringing you our next project."
As for what's actually contained in this thing, I'm going to try and summarise as best I can, seeing as even the abridged version of these notes is far too long to simply plonk on this page. First things first—the new evil and dark urge endings.
These horrific stopping points for your adventure should work whether you're on a new playthrough are not, and are so diabolical that the explicit content toggle even catches some—as the notes mention, the newly-renamed "Show Sexual and Violent Cinematics" catches both streamer-unfriendly sex scenes and gratuitous gore. As the notes state:
"This setting toggles explicit content plus a few select moments of extreme violence that may be distressing to some. We might have also embraced corruption a little too much because the new evil ending cinematics have been included in this setting. They really are that evil."
They also mention that, as per a prior community update, the option for the lovely and not-at-all in danger Alfira to join your companions for exactly one night is, indeed, temporary: "There are no new companions. There is only death."
The terrifying Honour Mode has had another round of updates, meaning I'm not sure I can actually brag about beating it anymore—Malus Thorm, the Bulette, Spectators (Beholder-spawn, not crowd members), two Gith encounters, and Ptaris have all had new legendary actions added to them. Because a permadeath run of a 100+ hour RPG wasn't hard enough already.
There's also the mod manager and toolkit, which is huge. Essentially, mods that are created via their official toolkit can now be downloaded and managed with an in-game browser, seen below. This thing will let you install these concoctions, as well as helping you to manage them in your multiplayer groups.
And then there's just a complete ream of gameplay tweaks, fixes, and quality of life improvements. Here's some highlights, in no particular order or priority preference:
- Split Screen gameplay's been revamped—allowing for dynamic merging of the screen when the players are close by to one another.
- You can use the Honour Mode ruleset in Custom Mode—previously, you'd have to make an Honour Mode save, die, and then enter Custom Mode.
- Camp supplies should now "only take what it needs from the stack", praise Mystra. The amount of times I accidentally used hundreds of the suckers was too close for comfort.
- New voice lines have been added for "edge-case flows."
- Your companions won't be terrible jerks to an un-ascended Astarion at the end of the game, anymore.
- Performance and animation improvements, "including with the Vampire Lord Astarion"—rest in peace, Grinch Astarion, we hardly knew ye.
- General fixes to pathfinding and gameplay issues—for instance, mage hands can't eat your Noblestalks anymore: "Yes, your Mage Hand probably ate it. No, we don't know where its mouth is."
Baldur's Gate 3 patch 7 is now live to download, and it'll need you to free up a whopping 160GB of free space to install—or uninstalling and reinstalling the patched version, in case your SSD's already filled up with Astarion and Shadowheart fanart.
